matlag

joined 1 year ago
[–] matlag 2 points 1 year ago

During the early days of cell phones, replaceable batteries was the norm, not the exception, and it was as complicated to perform as your TV remote. No need for training. In these modern days, you may want to turn off your phone cleanly before proceeding, but that's pretty much it!

Let's not even talk about the early handheld game sets: the GameBoy (Nintendo) and GameGear (Sega), that were using regular disposable batteries (rechargeable ones were recommended though!).

Vendors have made our devices complicated to repair to lower costs and later to make our smartphones water resistant. They started off being easy to disassemble and re-assemble.

[–] matlag 1 points 1 year ago

We did a 2400km trip 2 years ago. Tesla Model3 LR.

Totally adequate car overall, but that was in Canada: we started from south shore of Montréal, up to Prince Edward's Island, but avoiding Maine (we couldn't cross the US border because spouse is a Chinese citizen and was not yet Permanent Resident as the time). On the way back, we stopped at the Fundy National Park. That's a ~2400km overall.

The car was loaded, we were going camping: 2 adults + 1kid: tent, inflatable canoe, some canned food in case of, and various equipment to cook. All fit in the car with no need for a roof box. But we didn't have our bikes either. At the camping sites, when we could, we took a spot with a power plug (110V). It charges very slowly, but that's much better than nothing. When camping or simply spending several days in the same place, you need to mind the battery drain.

2 days to go, 2 days to come back Tesla has deployed quite some charging stations in east Canada (we crossed Québec and the New Brunswick) so we never had to use anything else, and we never worried about not reaching the next charger. Only in the Prince Edward's Island itself we didn't have a fast charging station, but there was a L2 public one not very far, walkable distance from the camping site. So the night before our departure, I left the car there to charge, and we were ready to roll in the morning.

Compared to a gas car's road trip, the comments I would make are:

-The obvious: you no longer stop "when the gauge gets low". You aim at the next charging station and that's where you'll stop, period.

-Stops are longer than a gas car. It's true that you can go for a coffee or alike, but that's how I realize that I never take 20mins to take a coffee... Add to that some stations are getting crowded, and multiple times we had to queue as all stations were occupied and some more cars were on an improvised list. Everyone behaved well waiting for their turn, but as EV get more popular, I assume bad players will start appearing too. This may get balanced by the wide adoption of the NCAS in North America (car makers are converting to Tesla's connector format in US and so that will follow in Canada), so all charging stations, Tesla and the others, will be usable by everyone eventually.

-The car is a blast to drive on a daily basis, and also pleasant to drive on long trips, though the road's noise is very present in the cabin (I've never tried any of the "hacks" to reduce the noise). This car has a ridiculous torque, so loading it does not impede much its driving pleasure.

We did a road trip in Spain last month (2800km), but we rented a small gas car instead of an EV, part because I was uncertain about the charging network, and part because I was uncertain about the chargers cost in Spain. In North America, the joke is fast-charging will be soon as expensive per km as a gas cars...

[–] matlag 2 points 1 year ago

And without that following, they aren’t shit. Alex Jones literally went bankrupt.

Alex Jones declared bankruptcy in an attempt to avoid paying the families who sued him and won. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64644080

But I overall agree: had he been deplatformed earlier, he could probably not have had so much influence and caused so much damage.

[–] matlag 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

After a terrorist attack, emergency state was declared (nomally used in case a war actually put the survival of the country's institutions in jeopardy). First use of the extra-powers: assign some targeted pacific climate activist at home so that there would not be a protest during the COP.

Anti-terrorism bill was passed some time ago. It was used to repress the protests against the retirement bill, literally banning anyone from carrying a saucepan in the street (ban of "noise emitting devices") during a protest.

Climate protesters have been labeled "eco-terrorist" even though they never put nor attempted to put anyone's life in danger.

France is under requests from the UN for fixing severe issues regarding right to protest, police excessive violence and systematic racism in the police force. France is taking a dire path, joining Hungaria, Turkey in authoritarism, maybe evolving to a clone of Russia, as there were hint of a will to change the constitution to let Macron run again after his second mandate.

I have 0 trust this bill is intended to be used for severe crimes. It's another attempt to control and repress.

[–] matlag 1 points 1 year ago

On the former, there is always a risk for the scraper. For example, you could scrape 100% of Youtube, but good luck spreading any piece of video out there.

My concern is on the latter and you don't need to do anything: if one user from Threads decides to follow you, you implicitly gave Threads permission to proceed, because the instances are federated. If I misunderstood their terms and conditions, I will happily welcome the correction.

[–] matlag 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

All instances can collect some level of info about you. Only one decided it's entitled to distribute it to third parties, use it to train its algorithms, and generally speaking make as much money as possible out of it.

[–] matlag 7 points 1 year ago

But in the process, you will also have a "monetize content from other instances users" phase.

[–] matlag 1 points 1 year ago

I don't think it's only IBM, I think IBM's business gets more visibility than others.

The issue is most likely related to critical size corporate. Beyond a certain size, growing further is difficult in your "core" business, so to expand, you need to add new activities. To avoid starting from scratch, the corporate will acquire another company.

That's where things get sketchy: what made that acquired company successful? It can be the product alone, in which case the product will just change its brand and business may continue as usual, but it may also largely be due to the smaller company having a better culture: promoting innovation, human-first drive, etc. All these things are easier to achieve with a smaller company, and very difficult to keep when you scale up and suddenly the CEO makes decisions for thousands of people whom existence he ignores, as compared to smaller company where the CEO has been to all offices (or almost) and met everyone at least once.

When the corporate absorbs the smaller one, they unify all procedures and treatments, and suddenly all the ingredients that made their acquired company successful are gone! From there, the fate is sealed: the activity will go down, slowly or less slowly.

[–] matlag 3 points 1 year ago

It IS literally a Linux distribution, based on Debian with a layer on top of it for easy admin and managing applications. So you don't install it on Linux, you just install it.

[–] matlag 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So, if you don't know yet what you're doing, I wouldn't host anything critical yet, but I'm using:

https://yunohost.org/

And so far, very few troubles. It's a layer on top of Debian to ease self-hosting. Comes by default with email and XMPP server. You can add Nextcloud and many other services as you wish.

[–] matlag 39 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Reddit was quite abrupt and efficient triggering a migration towards decentralized alternatives (ie: Lemmy). Twitter was taking way too much time to push users to the fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.). Elon doesn't like to be the second, so he's rushing the enshitification of the platform to stay ahead of Reddit.

[–] matlag 2 points 1 year ago

There's an army of institutions and economists who reviewed the issue over and over with 1 conclusion: there were many different solutions, raising the retirement age was ONE of them. So this was not necessary. This was a choice.

The system is a "simple" in/out equation. Twice in the past years this government has reduced the money in. Now they tell everyone they "saved" the system and there was no other solution. That's all BS.

And by the way: looks like they couldn't even do their math properly, because the system will still run a deficit by 2030. They counted some revenue twice. So much for "the experts"...

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